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Von Hahn: Red Canoe gives Canadiana a sense of genuine cool

Dax Wilkinson, president and creative director of Red Canoe, reclines at the store on Dundas St. W. near Ossington Ave. (Aaron Harris / Toronto Star)

Wilkinson has really tapped into something with the Red Canoe line’s nostalgic references to the Canada we all knew and loved growing up: the trans-Canada highway, the RCAF and RCMP, the CBC. (Aaron Harris / Toronto Star)

Clothing shown on display at the Red Canoe location on Dundas West in Toronto. (Aaron Harris / Toronto Star)

By Karen Von HahnSpecial to the Star

Thu., Sept. 9, 2010

Dax Wilkinson has had one hell of a year. Over the past few months, the Sudbury-born, Toronto-based designer and visionary behind heritage brand Red Canoe opened his first retail location (in Whistler, just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics), his first airport store (in the Montreal airport in June), inked a deal to supply both U.S.-based Boeing and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., and opened both a New York office and a new Toronto showroom.

Business at Red Canoe — the company Wilkinson founded in his basement in 2002, cutting out felt aviation insignias and sewing them on caps himself — is up a sweet 65 per cent over last year. Oh, and Wilkinson finally partnered on his dream plane, an amphibious 1974 Cessna 182.

“It has wheels and pontoons so it’s like two planes in one,” explains Wilkinson excitedly, squirming in the cracked leather wingback in his cabin-styled Dundas west showroom like a little kid. “I can just zip over to the island airport on my Vespa on a Friday afternoon, and then we’re up at our cabin at Aird Lake in an hour and a half.”

Unlike some self-styled lifestyle entrepreneurs seeking to replicate and then cash out on, say, the fin-de-siecle appeal of patrician country-club life (Ralph Lauren), old-school, New England resourcefulness (Martha Stewart), or the weathered and scrubbed virility of the American west (again, Ralph Lauren), Dax Wilkinson is the real deal. First, his name really is Dax Wilkinson. In fact, he’s the third generation of fashionable Wilkinsons: his grandfather’s store, Reg Wilkinson Men’s Wear is still the first choice for Sudbury’s finest. “He always had style,” says Wilkinson. “I still have his curling sweater.”

What’s more, Dax really lives the life Red Canoe expresses. Wilkinson spends most weekends up north — way north — in the outdoors taking his dogs and his two young children out on the land to fish and swim and boat and, yes, hunt.

But the real source of his design inspiration is that growing up in Sudbury, Wilkinson learned to fly a plane before he could drive a car.

“That’s how you’d get to your northern buck camps, your fishing camps,” says Dax. “Float-flying and bush flying are like a dying art now. But the De Havilland Beaver and the Otter — they were Canadian designed and built right here in Downsview, Ontario. Harrison Ford flies a De Havilland Beaver. It’s like the Canadian Harley Davidson.”

Indeed, Wilkinson has really tapped into something with the Red Canoe line’s nostalgic references to the Canada we all knew and loved growing up: the trans-Canada highway, the RCAF and RCMP, the CBC. Now encompassing some 150 separate items, from caps to t-shirts (designed and made right here in Toronto), sweaters and jackets, even leather goods and luggage, Red Canoe items immediately stand out from the dross with their vintage design and apparent old-world quality.

So much so that now, at typically schlockey souvenir shops in the airport, one finds oneself lingering lustfully over Red Canoe’s curatorial labels (brilliantly designed by Wilkinson’s wife Kirsten Gauthier, whose company, The Production Kitchen, is a big part of the Red Canoe magic), and curators of cool such as the Drake’s General store have scooped them for their own boutiques.

“When I started out, there was nothing that was cool out there that was Canadian, which is ridiculous because Canada is cool,” says Wilkinson. “It was just all this tacky junk with moose on it.”

For design inspiration with some authenticity, Wilkinson mines the visual archives of our not so distant past photographing highway signs, markings on light standards, and researching the historical logos of aviation companies and military units. “What seems to really resonate with people are designs that are all about utility,” says Wilkinson.

“The thing is, we do have this wonderful history of utilitarian design for the military, and for the gentlemanly pursuits outdoors that is really about good, classic, timeless design,” adds Wilkinson, whose ultimate goal for Red Canoe is to market this sophisticated vision to the rest of the world.

That a guy like Wilkinson has come along to offer us a new vision of ourselves shows truly that we have grown up. And when it comes to style, we have something both unique — and real — to say.

Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. See more at karenvonhahn.com and contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com

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